1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system in which data is transferred from an information processing apparatus to an image forming apparatus and is processed, and components of the printing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in order to use an output device such as a printer from an information processing apparatus such as a personal computer, usually, a particular printer driver which is compatible with the output device needs to be incorporated. If a plurality of output devices is used, the same number of printer drivers as the number of the used output devices have to be incorporated. A user has been forced to perform troublesome installation work for checking an IP address and finding the compatible printer driver from the Internet, each time the printer driver is incorporated. In addition, in recent years, the number of personal computers has exploded, and thus, maintenance costs for the printer drivers have also increased, which is not negligible.
Consequently, a printer driver, which enables the plurality of output devices to be used regardless of types of the output devices, has been researched and developed. In other words, there is a technique. In the technique, a core module which is a core of a printer driver divided into a plurality of modules is acquired by bidirectionally communicating with a printer connected at a port destination. Then, a type-dependent module is acquired from a type of the printer at the port destination by the acquired core module, and necessary modules are configured and caused to operate as a driver which is compatible with the type of the printer at the port destination (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-259085).
Moreover, a method has been realized in which a printer driver which has received print data from an application spools printing/drawing once, processes spooled data, and then performs a despool process to perform printing again (for example, Japanese Patent No. 3363793).
However, each time the driver is installed, for example, it is necessary to perform cumbersome setting related to a print queue, including port setting and the like, in detail, such as downloading the driver, checking an address of the printer, and setting the address of the printer to a device driver.
An object of the present invention is to provide a mechanism which reduces the trouble of performing setup of the printer driver.
Furthermore, another object of the present invention is to provide a mechanism for preliminary setup in order to reduce the cumbersomeness of the above setting.